The only major demographic in the country that doesn't? People who don't know about it.

Supporters of Pakistani Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami protest against the military operations and drone attacks in the tribal areas in Karachi / Reuters

Here at The Atlantic yesterday, Christine Fair, Karl Kaltenthaler, and William J. Miller argued a claim I'd never encountered about the CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan: "Yes, drone strikes are not very popular among a large section of Pakistani society," they admit. "But Pakistanis are not united in
opposition to drone strikes. In fact, many Pakistanis support the
drone strikes. This suggests that there is room for the United States to
engage in a
public diplomacy campaign to win over more Pakistanis to the idea
that drone strikes are not the bringers of carnage that is so often
portrayed in the
Urdu-language media in Pakistan if the United States could be
persuaded to bring this worst-kept secret out of the closet and into
embassy briefings."

At first, I was skeptical. Humans are typically averse to foreign spy agencies killing their countrymen. Could public diplomacy really rally Pakistanis in favor of drone strikes on their own soil? Could it really disabuse them of the notion that drones bring carnage, given that they do?

Then I read the rest of the piece.

As it turns out, the advice is as dubious as it seems. The authors offer strained interpretations of public opinion data, are strangely confident that U.S. forays into Pakistani public discourse would be successful, and assume human nature is very different than long experience suggests. And the glaring inadequacy of the interventionist worldview is laid bare in their approach.

Here is how they introduce their methodology:

Pew's 2010 report
on the drone war declared: "There is
little support for U.S. drone strikes against extremist leaders --
those who are aware of those attacks generally say they are not
necessary, and
overwhelmingly they believe that the strikes kill too many
civilians." Drone foes have seized upon these and subsequent survey
results and marshaled them
as iron-class proof that Washington's drone program faces a wall of Pakistani public opposition...
When one examines all of the
data gathered by Pew on
drones in Pakistan, a very different and much more complex picture
emerges about Pakistani attitudes toward various aspects of the American
drone program.
A more detailed look at the data suggests that that even while some
Pakistanis think drones kill too many innocent Pakistanis, they are
still necessary.

To get a more complete understanding of Pakistani public opinion, we studied the full range of answers related to drones from the 2010
Pew Global Attitudes Project
survey, looking at the respondent-level data. Public commentary has
been based upon selective stories about misleading tabulations. For
example, a large
majority of Pakistanis indicated that the drone strikes killed too
many innocents. Drone opponents use this and other questions to link
collateral damage
to their claim that drone strikes are unpopular. In fact, most
Pakistanis were either unaware of the drone program or declined to
answer questions about
them in 2010. Only 35 percent of the sample professed knowledge of
the drone program -- compared to 43 percent who said they knew nothing.
The difference
is comprised of persons who chose not to answer the question for
whatever reason. Most of the drone-critical commentary based upon these
2010 data does not
acknowledge that conclusions are being drawn from a minority of all respondents.

The authors are absolutely right: the drone program is unpopular only among the people who know about it. Pakistanis who don't know about it don't think about it in unfavorable terms... or at all!

In that sense, it's like gonorrhea. Folks who know what it is don't like it. But who are we to assume that people who don't have any knowledge of it would be against it too, especially if they found out about the STD through a pro-gonorrhea pr campaign? Of course, drone strikes don't affect their victims in the same way as sexually transmitted diseases -- they're much, much worse.

The authors would surely object to my dismissive characterization. In the interest of fairness, here's more of their argument:

Knowledge of the drone
program has grown slightly, as has opposition to it. Spring 2012 data
demonstrate that 56
percent of Pakistanis have heard something about the drone program
and 21 percent knew nothing about it at all despite the extensive media
coverage in
Pakistan and beyond. Another 23 percent of respondents declined to
say whether they had heard of the drone strikes. Among those who had
heard of the
program in 2012, 17 percent said that drone strikes are necessary to
defend Pakistan from extremist groups (when done in conjunction with
the Pakistani
government), whereas 44 percent opposed the strikes. While 41
percent who were familiar with the program believe that they are being
conducted without
their government's approval; 47 percent correctly believe that their
government has given its approval for these strikes. Clearly, Pakistani
public opinion
is not as informed and much less unanimous as commentators often
presume. There is not a wall of opposition to drone strikes in Pakistan
but a vocal
plurality that merely gives that impression.

So the same basic point: among people who know about drones, opponents outnumber supporters by more than two to one, but only 56 percent of Pakistanis know about the drone program. Given these figures and trends, you'd think that proponents of more drone strikes in Pakistan would want as few additional people as possible to know about them. Secrecy is the approach the Obama Administration and Pakistan's government have taken. The authors think they know better.

The explicit advice that they give:

The United States has avoided discussing this program publicly
because it is covert. Officials likely suspect that being more
transparent about the program
will have little effect because they, too, assume that Pakistanis
universally oppose the drones. However, our analysis suggests that such
assumptions are
dead wrong. Pakistanis are indeed responsive to information about
this program -- for better or for worse. If the United States wants to
make this program
sustainable, it will likely have to find ways of being more
transparent. The drone war may be a war against militants. But there is
also a war for
Pakistani hearts and minds about the legitimacy of the war against
militancy as well as the means to fight it...

Washington needs to be more assertive and transparent in discussing
drone strikes in Pakistan because it must draw to its side the large
swath of the
population that doesn't even know about the program. This may mean
using radio, non-cable TV (including local Pakistani networks) or even
hyperlocal media
such as SMS -- and it means doing so in Urdu and perhaps other
vernacular languages. So far, the United States seems content to
communicate with Pakistanis
using the language only a miniscule fraction of the country knows:
English.

I don't know that I've ever seen a better example of interventionist hubris and naivete than this suggestion. They imagine that the United States is capable of persuading poor Pakistanis to embrace drone strikes with text messages in Urdu and "other vernacular languages"? Yes, perhaps President Obama can tap another former Bush official, Karen Hughes, to oversee the effort. America has had such success in the past changing "hearts and minds" in the Muslim world, what's to say that they couldn't radically transform the popularity of blowing up Pakistanis.

The emphasis on the need for transparency is particularly rich.

How might the truth be phrased?

"Dear Pakistani citizen: American spies are using unmanned killer sky robots to blow up Muslims we suspect of terrorism. Sometimes we know the identities of the people we kill but many times we don't. There are rules governing the drone strikes, but we can't tell you what they are, and the CIA is exempt from them when operating in Pakistan anyway. If you assume that all dead males of military age are militants, as we do, we figure we've killed thousands of militants and only hundreds of woman and children. We don't do anything to compensate the families of the innocents."

Yes, transparency should do the trick.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf head Imran Khan, wearing a traditional turban, speaks to supporters during a peace march against U.S. drone strikes from Islamabad to South Waziristan, in Pakistan's northwestern town of Tank October 7, 2012 / Reuters

About the Author

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

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